With no identifiable body parts, it's hard to know how these fossilized creatures lived. A new approach models how the ocean's water would interact with their unique shapes – hinting at their lifestyle.

In a recent paper in Nature, we described a strange marine animal, called Tamisiocaris. They were giants that swam in the oceans over 500 million years ago. They had strange looking appendages on their…

Marine life during the Cambrian explosion. A giant Anomalocaris investigates a trilobite, while Opabinia looks on from the right, and the ‘walking cactus’ Diania crawls underneath.
Katrina Kenny & Nobumichi TamuraSeptember 13, 2013

The sudden appearance of a range of modern animals about half a billion years ago, during evolution’s “big bang”, has intrigued and puzzled generations of biologists from Charles Darwin onwards. A new…